Category: Healing and Helping Professionals

Posted on

Doctors hesitate to prolong their own lives to avoid pain

IT IS a common refrain from doctors doing the ward rounds in the intensive care unit of any major hospital: ”Please don’t ever let this happen to me.”

Most often the words are uttered at hand-over time when the day-shift doctors brief the evening-shift doctors at the foot of an elderly patient.

”He might be 80 years old, severe dementia, type two diabetes, previous strokes and a bit of renal failure, and now he’s fallen in the nursing home and suffered a head injury,” says Ken Hillman, professor of intensive care at the University of NSW, ”and the family wants him continued on life support hoping for a miracle.”
Advertisement: Story continues below

There might be six specialists, eight junior doctors and when one finds the courage to say the words, ”We’ll all nod,” says Professor Hillman.

Professor Hillman believes many doctors would not put themselves through ”the same hell we often put other patients through”.

Professor Hillman is a speaker at a conference at NSW Parliament House next week on living well and dying well. The conference is organised by the non-profit organisation LifeCircle which helps people caring for loved ones at the end of their life. ”We support people having a good life right to the end with the conversations that will benefit the person dying and those they love,” said Brynnie Goodwill, the chief executive of LifeCircle.

With daily reports of miracle cures and medical breakthroughs, many people with advanced life-threatening cancers and other terminal illnesses pursue every possible treatment, no matter how gruelling, in the hope of extending life.

But do doctors choose the same path for themselves? The silence around doctors’ views was shattered earlier this year when Ken Murray, retired clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Southern California, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that ”what’s unusual about [doctors] is not how much treatment they get … but how little.” He said doctors did not want to die any more than anyone else did. ”But they usually have talked about the limits of modern medicine with their families. They want to make sure that, when the time comes, no heroic measures are taken.”

Medical scepticism about life-saving interventions was revealed in a 1996 German poll where about half the specialists admitted they would not undergo the operations they recommended to their patients. A study last year, published in Archives of Internal Medicine, showed doctors often advised patients to opt for treatment they would not choose for themselves.

For example, asked to consider treatments for colon cancer, 38 per cent of doctors chose the option for themselves that had a low rate of side effects but higher risk of death (over an option with a high rate of side effects but lower risk of death). But only 24 per cent recommended this option for their patients.

Martin Tattersall, the professor of cancer medicine at the University of Sydney, said: ”I suspect very few doctors would opt for second or third line chemo therapy; my suspicion is that doctors are more likely to prescribe futile therapy than accept it. They’re aware of the statistics. The fact we’re not invincible is something doctors are reminded of every day of their practice and it probably slightly colours their attitude to fighting death as opposed to accepting it.”

Dr Rodney Syme, the author of A Good Death, said his father, a surgeon, when diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, refused surgery to relieve his jaundice even though he had performed the surgery on others many times. ”He didn’t believe there was enough merit in it,” Dr Syme said.

But Richard Chye, the director of palliative care at Sacred Heart, part of St Vincent’s Hospital, said doctors were distributed along the same spectrum as everyone else. ”I’ve known doctors to continue treatment right up until the end,” he said. ”It’s very much about their age group and attitude.”

Professor Hillman said 70 per cent of Australians said they wanted to die at home but 70 per cent died in hospitals.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

Death Is A Hard Sell

I had a very interesting weekend. On Saturday, June 2nd, I attended a day long event at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The program was titled: Moving Beyond Cancer to Wellness.

It was a great program full of interesting workshops. There was also a small vendors area. A bunch of cancer-related agencies set up tables and on them they displayed their brochures for the programs and support they offer people living with cancer.

I thought this would be the ideal setting for networking with other like-minded folks, so when I visited each of the vendors I introduced myself and proudly handed the person at the table a copy of my book. The reactions were nearly always negative or at least alarm. Once the person saw the title, The Amateur’s Guide To Death and Dying; Enhancing the End of Life, the smiles that greeted me when I first approached the table soon turned to dismay. Their reaction to the book was as if I had handed them something disgusting.

It was immediately clear to me that bringing a book about death and dying to a cancer survival event was a huge faux pas. Despite my protestations that the work their agency was doing and the information in my book were very much alike. The only difference being their outreach is disease-specific, while my book is about mortality. I wasn’t able to convince them.

So ok, I get it. Death is a hard sell to the disease-specific crowd. Apparently contemplating one’s mortality, even when it is staring us in the face is not the politically correct thing to do. But why is that? Facing our mortality doesn’t undercut a person’s commitment to fighting his/her disease process. I contend that consciously facing the prospect of life’s end really helps put our effort in fighting a disease into perspective.

Curiously enough the reaction I got from the other participants at the Moving Beyond Cancer to Wellness event was much different from that of the vendors. I think most people who encounter their mortality through a disease process, like cancer, know, deep down inside, that this could be the beginning of the end. Why else would people react as they do when they get a diagnosis?

The other participants at the event, the ones I showed my book to, had a much less phobic reaction to it. I contend that this is because they’ve already put themselves there, at death’s door. This sort of takes a lot of the sting out of death.

Were they any more enthusiastic about taking a long hard look at their own mortality? Probably not. But then again, they weren’t as resistant to the idea as were the ostensibly well people manning the vender tables.

I try to imagine what things would be like if we all were encouraged to examine the end of our life, much in the same way as women are encouraged to do a periodic breast self-exam. I mean, examining one’s breast for lumps, or other abnormalities doesn’t increase your risk for breast cancer, right? Neither does facing one’s mortality in a conscious, upfront way hasten death.

Finally, on Sunday I met with a young couple for their weekly couple’s counseling session. Once we were all settled in, I handed them a copy of my book. (I just love watching people’s reactions.) The young man spoke first. “That’s a bit scary.” He said after he read the title. “Scary, I mean for the people who need this book.” I replied, “I suppose it is. But you know what’s even scarier? Not thinking about the end of life before it’s too late. I mean, are you certain that you’re not among those who need this book? Are you certain that you will live to see the end of the day?”

Death is a hard sell in our death-denying culture. Yet, each of the people I encountered this past weekend will, in time, face the end of their life. That’s a given. The big question is; will they have the time or even the inclination to face their mortality in a way that will enrich their lives as they live it to the end?

Posted on

When Doctors Grieve

COMMENTARY — Leeat Granek

MY mother died of breast cancer in 2005 after living with the disease for nearly 20 years. Her oncologist, whom I knew from the time I was 9 years old, was her doctor for most of that time. I practically grew up in the hospital, and my family felt quite close to the health care providers, especially the oncologist. After my mother died I wondered if the feeling was mutual.

Do doctors grieve when their patients die? In the medical profession, such grief is seldom discussed — except, perhaps, as an example of the sort of emotion that a skilled doctor avoids feeling. But in a paper published on Tuesday in Archives of Internal Medicine (and in a forthcoming paper in the journal Death Studies), my colleagues and I report what we found in our research about oncologists and patient loss: Not only do doctors experience grief, but the professional taboo on the emotion also has negative consequences for the doctors themselves, as well as for the quality of care they provide.

Our study took place from 2010 to 2011 in three Canadian hospitals. We recruited and interviewed 20 oncologists who varied in age, sex and ethnicity and had a wide range of experience in the field — from a year and a half in practice in the case of oncology fellows to more than 30 years in the case of senior oncologists. Using a qualitative empirical method known as grounded theory, we analyzed the data by systematically coding each interview transcript line by line for themes and then comparing the findings from each interview across all interviews to see which themes stood out most robustly.

We found that oncologists struggled to manage their feelings of grief with the detachment they felt was necessary to do their job. More than half of our participants reported feelings of failure, self-doubt, sadness and powerlessness as part of their grief experience, and a third talked about feelings of guilt, loss of sleep and crying.

Our study indicated that grief in the medical context is considered shameful and unprofessional. Even though participants wrestled with feelings of grief, they hid them from others because showing emotion was considered a sign of weakness. In fact, many remarked that our interview was the first time they had been asked these questions or spoken about these emotions at all.

The impact of all this unacknowledged grief was exactly what we don’t want our doctors to experience: inattentiveness, impatience, irritability, emotional exhaustion and burnout.

Even more distressing, half our participants reported that their discomfort with their grief over patient loss could affect their treatment decisions with subsequent patients — leading them, for instance, to provide more aggressive chemotherapy, to put a patient in a clinical trial, or to recommend further surgery when palliative care might be a better option. One oncologist in our study remarked: “I see an inability sometimes to stop treatment when treatment should be stopped. When treatment’s futile, when it’s clearly futile.” From a policy standpoint, this is an especially worrisome finding, given the disproportionately high percentage of heath care budgets spent on end-of-life care.

Unease with losing patients also affected the doctors’ ability to communicate about end-of-life issues with patients and their families. Half of our participants said they distanced themselves and withdrew from patients as the patients got closer to dying. This meant fewer visits in the hospital, fewer bedside visits and less overall effort directed toward the dying patient.

It’s worth stressing that most physicians want what is best for their patients and that the outcome of any medical intervention is often unknown. It’s also worth noting that oncologists and other physicians who are dealing with end-of-life issues are right to put up some emotional boundaries: no one wants their doctor to be walking around openly grief-stricken.

But our research indicates that grief is having a negative impact on oncologists’ personal lives and that there is a troubling relationship between doctors’ discomfort with death and grief and how patients and their families are treated. Oncologists are not trained to deal with their own grief, and they need to be. In addition to providing such training, we need to normalize death and grief as a natural part of life, especially in medical settings.

To improve the quality of end-of-life care for patients and their families, we also need to improve the quality of life of their physicians, by making space for them to grieve like everyone else.

Leeat Granek is a health psychologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Complete Article HERE!